The issue facing MITS was the computer
was programmed with 8 on/off switches. This made programming
a tedious effort at best.

The appearance of a solution showed
up in a letter sent to MITS from a firm marketing a program called Traf-O-Data.
This company was a part-time business for a couple of high school students
named Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

They offered a computerlanguage known as BASIC to MITS. Let's not
forget the trivial point that neither of these individuals actually
had this language for the Altair.

BASIC was available in the
public domain for different CPUs(Central Processing
Unit), which is considered the computers brain.

Their prior experience of using a
simulator on a DEC computer for Traf-O-Data allowed them
to work a few frantic weeks through which they were able to make BASIC
work on an Altair without the experience of ever having seen
one. (Emulators or simulators allow you to write programs on one system
to run on another system.)

With the success of their efforts,
PaulAllen went to work at MITS and Bill Gates
dropped out of Harvard and moved to Albuquerque.

The two individuals granted a non-exclusive
license to MITS, which made many hobbyists, resent them. Their point
was that BASIC had come from the public domain and they had used
government-funded computers to pirate BASIC for
the Altair.

These young men founded a new firm
to market BASIC to other firms making microcomputers.
They called this firm Microsoft.

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